Where Is the Alacritty Config File?
Alacritty reads a single alacritty.toml from the standard config directory on every OS, with an old YAML name to watch for.
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Alacritty has no settings UI at all. The entire terminal, fonts, colors, key bindings, lives in one TOML file the app reads at startup. Edit, save, restart the window.
The path follows each OS convention rather than the app inventing its own. Linux and macOS share the XDG style location, Windows uses Roaming AppData. A missing file is not an error: Alacritty simply runs on defaults until you create one.
Where Alacritty stores this, by platform
%APPDATA%\alacritty\alacritty.toml
Create alacritty.toml here if it does not exist. Imports in the file can pull shared snippets from elsewhere, handy for dotfiles repos.
~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
Same filename as Windows. Use mkdir -p ~/.config/alacritty first, since the app never creates the folder itself.
~/.config/alacritty/alacritty.toml
Identical layout to Linux. Homebrew installs change nothing about where the config lives.
Frequently asked questions
My config stopped working after updating. Why?
Version 0.13 switched from YAML to TOML and renamed the file. An alacritty.yml in the same folder is silently ignored by new builds, so port its contents into alacritty.toml and delete the relic.
Can I split config across files?
Yes. Alacritty merges imported files over the main one, so platform tweaks can live in small files the shared config pulls in. One dotfiles repo then serves all three OSes.
Notice an outdated path? Let us know.